On 14/2/19 12:00 am, Robbie Smith wrote:
> I don't have much faith in Australian authorities being able to

> adequately assess future needs, let alone build infrastructure that

> will meet them. We'd rather spend $billions pouring concrete on

> half-baked projects that over-promise and under-deliver, and blame the

> Opposition when it doesn't work.


As I said in another forum recently -

-

A colleague's wife who had specialized in transport modeling
(construction and testing of mathematical models of transport flows) got
a few years work out of the Olympics, but when that finished they were
all let go instead of being merged into 'transport'.

She's never had a permanent job since in her chosen field since.
A comment made to me was Australia's (particularly NSW) idea of
transport planning is purely civil engineering driven - its all about
building things, NOT optimizing the flow of people or goods.

What transport modeling is done, is only done to support the case for
building more things, no one wants to know the 'big picture', especially
one that may say you don't need to build more big things, but just
optimize the flows on what you already have with a number of little changes.

-

These other countries employ transport modelers, who construct intricate
mathematical models, test the basis of the models to prove them, THEN
the important bit - the government believe the models and act on them
for the greater good.

The Anglo-sphere has a long history of abusing the modeling profession
to either promote their pet infrastructure project or trying to use it
to pin a failure of a project to solve the congestion problem on some
one else.